I'm not a Petroleum Engineer but even I know that production capacity has been increased by technology & improved recovery techniques.
Lie #2: Yet with a few exceptions, there just isn't much left out there to be discovered.
This guys 'exceptions' must be known and are not new discoveries. What's left out there to be discovered is anybody's guess.
These people sound more & more like the "We're running out of oil!!" chicken littles of the 1970's. But if you really believe we are about to run out of oil you ought to buy the stocks of companies that are involved in oil exploration and off shore drilling, such as DO and RIG etc. because they are about to make a bundle.
That's not where the money is. Every amateur is playing that game and it just isn't returning a lot. It has always been the adventurous who come to town one day with pockets full of gold, and most of them go bust, but the few that make it make it big. The surest way to fame and fortune these days is to go where the gold is, and that is Federal contracts. Dept of Energy gives away $5 billion a year for nothing, try to horn in on that racket.